CHAPTER 21: IN THIS TOGETHER.

340 25 77
                                    

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONEIn This Together

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In This Together

━━━━━━🕷━━━━━━

            TONY STARK—genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist, superhero—was not the biggest fan of children. Not because they were little criminal masterminds who hid their evil schemes in coded crayon drawings and alphabet soup, but because they were never a demographic he encountered all that often. Oh, sure, there had been that Keener kid back in 2012, and then he'd kind of kidnapped a fourteen-year-old boy to take to Germany, but those were outliers. Even if, according to Happy, said fourteen-year-old boy (wait, wasn't he fifteen now?), wouldn't stop calling him.

Because of this, it was odd for him to willingly go strolling into an interrogation room where he knew he'd have to interact with another kid. This was what he paid people to do for him, after all. With a wave of his hand and a slight deduction from his bank account, someone else could do the job he had no interest in doing. But when he'd heard that a girl had somehow been involved in the entire weapons trafficking, plane hijacking incident, he'd had to go check it out for himself.

According to the officers he'd spoken to at the front of the police station, Cecelia Olivier had been picked up an hour ago after placing what was meant to be an anonymous call to 9-1-1. In it, she'd claimed that she'd apprehended one of the men responsible for the weapon trafficking organization that had been happening right under their noses. She hadn't mentioned that said man was her uncle.

Even though she'd fled the scene, officers had caught up to her at Central Park, where she'd been sitting by herself in a wrinkled pink-and-silver dress. They'd taken her in—not to arrest her, they'd insisted, but as a key witness. Still, it had been reported that the kid was uncomfortable around law enforcement, likely due to her Native American identity. She'd refused to talk to anyone they'd brought in, and the police were getting desperate.

So here Tony was. As someone who'd saved the world—multiple times, not to toot his own horn—getting a stubborn teenager to speak should be a piece of cake. Maybe she'd be so starstruck by his appearance that she'd blurt out every skeleton in her closet right away. Tony had that kind of charm about him.

However, when he actually stepped into the interrogation room—which really was a bleak place; would it kill them to do a little bit of interior decorating?—the girl's reaction wasn't exactly what he'd been hoping for.

She was sipping from a packet of Tropical Punch Kool-Aid and picking at a chocolate banana muffin when he let the door swing shut behind him. At least they were feeding her; that was good. Her hair was wet, too, so they must have allowed her to wash off in the bathroom. She was still wearing her dress, though, and had rested her flats beside one of the rickety table legs.

At the sound of his footsteps, she looked up. She really was young. Probably Peter's age, with a full, rounded face that hadn't quite lost all of its baby fat yet. Her dark hair tumbled down her shoulders, which were hunched in on themselves. There was a dimness to her eyes that reminded Tony too much of every time he looked in the mirror.

REVENANT- Peter Parker ¹Where stories live. Discover now